This will take two clicks. First choose 32-bit or 64-bit on the right; then "run".

(There are couple of other questions asked, but you can accept the defaults.)

:) questions dont' important :D only one download here, only win32 have bitness choice

only win32 have bitness choice

To quote the op:

My question is: Is there anything that can run Perl in Win7...

Learn to read!

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With the rise and rise of 'Social' network sites: 'Computers are making people easier to use everyday'

Examine what is said, not who speaks -- Silence betokens consent -- Love the truth but pardon error.

"Science is about questioning the status quo. Questioning authority". I knew I was on the right track :)

In the absence of evidence, opinion is indistinguishable from prejudice.

bare-bones dirt-simple no-configure one-click-install

i would go for strawberry portable edition 1: download, 2: extract, 3: run portableshell.bat TADAA!

L*

You should always listen to Your Mother. In addition to the Strawberry Perl advice I'd like to point out the Padre IDE.

First, thanks to all for the prompt responses :)

BrowserUk: Got it! So far so good.

perl-diddler: From a first glance, cygwin looks like it veers into that programming-configuring territory that I'm bad at.

stevieb: Thanks. IIRC MacOS up to 8.6(ish) was its own Apple-proprietary thing, then OSX (MacOS 10) was the first full-Unix based one, with OS9.(x) being the transition phase.

--

Just one little follow-up question (though I suspect the answer will be beyond my copy-paste-cargo-cult programming skills...): The program plain text output goes to a DOS box, where I can right-click to select all and copy out all of the text. Is there a *dirt-simple* way to change the basic 'print' command where it directs the text output to a Windows-style window that I can mouse-highlight small portions of it to be copied out?

Many users prefer Citrus or Strawberry to ActivePerl. You might not but you should know they are an option.

• citrusperl.com
• strawberryperl.com

Get Notepad++.

Copy all the Perl output to a new Notepad++ file and edit it.

If enough interest is shown, I will consider getting an msi installer written by friends who know about those things to make berrybrew available with a one-click install that fetches, configures, installs the most recent Perl version, switches to it, then leaves the user with a Perl that can be used immediately.

As of now, I couldn't recommend it, because it does take config, and after re-reviewing the docs, things aren't all that clear for setup. It would be a nice feature though, me thinks. For now, for ease of integration, I'm with BrowserUK.

"I can mouse-highlight small portions of it to be copied out?"

First, the command window is not DOS although a lot of ancient DOS commands do work within this window.

To copy and paste things to/from the command window:
- open a command window
- Right click on the title bar
- Under Options select "QuickEditMode" and "InsertMode".
- click "Ok"
- apply changes to all shortcuts that start command window when asked (not just this one)
-To copy text from command window, hold left mouse button and drag over text to highlight it, then tap right mouse button to copy to the "clipboard". Now you can use CRL-V to paste or use mouse menu to do the same in another application. To copy something into the command window, like perhaps a command, get it into the clipboard. Move mouse to the command window and tap the right mouse button to do the insert.

There are various options to increase the buffer size (history) of the command window. Play with that if needed.

To re-execute a previous command (perhaps with some editing), use the "up arrow" to bring last command typed back to the entry line.

Tested on WinXP, but Win7 should work the same.

Update: You have to use the mouse left/right click as I described above. The normal CTL-C (copy) and CTL-V (paste) command shortcuts don't work as Windows Command Window thinks that you are tying that stuff in as an actual command. So copy and paste to/from the command window is a bit different than from a typical editor window (textpad, Windword, wordpad, etc).

Since the Mac is *nix based, and perl was original developed on unix, you might appreciate a unix-style implementation using Cygwin. Cygwin gives you a posixish-linuxish-gnuish type environment on windows (only 64bit these days), that also runs perl.

If you don't need to run perl to administer native windows, but just as an application platform, I'd suggest loading Cygwin (cygwin.org), and loading their perl (its also opensource/free SW).

Cygwin is way overkill for the OPs requirements, unless the script requires nix-based resources. We don't know the reqs, but I'd save recommending an emulation environment to the very last resort. The Windows Perl installs contain the core utilities to make Unixy things work anyhow.

Besides, was MacOS nixy back in those days? I seem to recall it was a lot different then...

Overkill or underkill? It's not an emulation environment, but a software layer that MS recommended to replace their Unix Services for Windows environment when they phased it out.

By default, if you install the base cygwin env, you are going to get a tty interface.

The OP said: <quote> All I need is one window to paste the program and one to see the text-only output; no graphics, modules, or other bells & whistles. </quote> The windows perl installs don't do a great job of making unixy things work - they often end up using '\' as a path separate when the win32 and lower NT-OS layers both accepted '/'.

The main thing I didn't like working in the windows env was its crappy shell (command.com=>cmd.exe). It was designed on the mainframe idea of overloading switches and options onto a few commands vs. the unix idea of splitting things up so you can chain them together however you want. I mostly thought the OP would be unhappy with the windows CLI.

With a cygwin env, you can run other terminal emulators configured as you like, and emac or gvim in graphics mode rather than in a TTY mode that has poor font support.

But I *do* have my own issues w/Cygwin -- but I'm alot more particular than most and I was going by what the OP wrote in wanting simplicity.

I agree with stevieb about not going with Cygwin as the first recommendation on how to get Perl on Windows. Not only is it serious overkill, but the last time that I tried to uninstall Cygwin (about 10-12 years ago) it didn't go very well (i.e. reinstalling Windows was the only way to cleanly uninstall Cygwin).

If someone is wanting to use Perl on Windows without compiling it from source code, I'd recommend going with Strawberry Perl, ActiveState's ActivePerl (also linked to in BrowserUk's post), or Citrus Perl. If there is a strong need for other aspects of the Cygwin environmet, then and only then would I be ok with recommending Cygwin.

Cygwin, by default installs all in 1 directory -- you delete the directory and it is uninstalled.

However, if you choose a custom install, and put it in the root dir, it might be more complicated.

It doesn't tie into the windows sys dir, and didn't used to even touch the registry. The only thing it uses the registry for is to allow users to install multiple - separate copies (which most users don't need).

I've tried Strawberry perl, activestate's perl (very incompat w/standard perl env using cpan) -- can't say I've tried citrus though.

One thing that made me as pleased as punch, was when Cygwin went 64-bit. All of the cygwin-x64 environment is available in safemode ***AND*** in the recovery environment. But that's nothing to do with perl, so enough of that. ;-).

I just find the bash env more comfy to design from. I often start simple scripts in shell or perl in the shell, editing it on the command line, then moving to the visual editor (invoking vi or whatever), and then writing it to a file and moving on from there. Set the number option in Vim, and exec perl scripts in another win -- and see things side-by-side. Simple paradigm that works the same for me on Windows as on linux -- same tool chain. No special Graphics or IDE's to learn.. alot may depend on what tools he is used to, but cut/paste -- highlight text and it is "selected", and use a middle click to paste somewhere if all is under 'X' -- but if in windows, extra keyboard usage and cumbersome.

But I'm not on the latest cygwin -- I didn't have the time/energy to work around newer changes that my highly customized environment often ran up against. I have the same logins on my linux and windows server -- with the linux server hosting files and the user-authentication for my windows system via a samba based domain on the linux server. Now that would all be overkill, but the basics seem ... so basic.

Macs went *nix at 10 (aka OS X). System 8 was a specially compiled MacPerl just for Macs.